Monday, September 3, 2018

Cutting The Cord With Philo TV

I don't have much use for cable these days. In fact, I spent almost the entire Summer burning through 8 seasons of Shameless on Netflix and catching up on various other shows on Hulu. There are really only a few shows on cable that constitute "appointment" viewing for me, those being "Better Call Saul", "Rick and Morty" and "Venture Brothers". Those shows are important enough to me that I've hesitated to cut the cord completely. Until now.

Enter Philo TV. Philo is a streaming service that offers 40 channels for $16 per month or an extended package of 49 channels for $20 per month. Here's the channel rundown:

Philo $16/month package

A&E

AMC

Animal Planet

AXS TV

BBC America

BBC World News

BET

Cheddar

Cheddar Big News

CMT

Comedy Central

Discovery Channel

DIY

Food Network

FYI

GSN

HGTV

History

IFC

Investigation Discovery (ID)

Lifetime

Lifetime Movies

MTV

MTV2

Nickelodeon

Nick Jr.

OWN

Paramount Network

PeopleTV

Science

Sundance Channel

Tastemade

TeenNick

TLC

Travel Channel

TV Land

Velocity

VH1

Viceland

We TV

Philo $20/month package (Includes All Channels In The $16 Package)

American Heroes Channel

BET Her

Cooking Channel

Destination America

Discovery Family

Discovery Life

Logo

MTV Live

Nicktoons

You can watch any of the channel streams on Philo live, or you can watch the individual shows on demand. You can also save any show to your own personal DVR space and it will be available for 30 days.

But how do you watch Philo? Well, the channel is available for Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, IOS, Android and various internet browsers. My own personal solution is to watch Philo via the Chrome browser on my Chromebook and run the HDMI stream through it to my TV. The result actually looks pretty good:

I think, overall, Philo is a pretty good deal for $16/per month. Your mileage may vary depending on what you're into watching. But, for a guy who likes certain channels and who isn't into watching sports on TV, it's a no brainer buy. The channel line-up doesn't include AdultSwim/Cartoon Network but I can catch those shows via the channel's streaming events. And I'm hoping that they'll eventually roll out support for the PS4.